About Me

Thursday, 24 December 2015

Christmas Midnight: Humility and Awe

Christmas
Midnight

The
problem with the word ‘Awe’ is that in the modern West we tend to
precede it with two other words, ‘Shock and...’ ‘Shock and
awe’ has become the phrase used by Western military commanders to
describe a way of waging war on a country they expect to be
completely unprepared and unable to defend itself against the
onslaught. It
has become a tactic of overwhelming force that treats another country
with contempt. But I want to suggest to you that this is the wrong
way of understanding awe. This is to put ‘awe’ in terms of human
power and maybe arrogance. If we are going to properly understand
Christmas we have to put away the phrase ‘shock and awe’ and
replace it with ‘humility and awe.’

To
comprehend the miracle of what has taken place we need to look first
at ourselves and understand something of what we are. So I’d like
you to hold your hands wide open and facing each other about 5 or 6 inches apart. In
the space between it is possible to fit your human brain, that
spongy, fragile, blancmange like thing which is the place where most
of your conscious mind resides. I say, ‘Most of’ because the
scientific jury is still out on whether the rest of your body may
also have contributions to make to that sense of ‘Me’ that we all
have. Certainly
those of us who do any form of meditative exercise know that it’s
possible to move your sense of awareness around the body. But to all
intents and purposes that lump of matter that can sit between your
hands, to put it colloquially, ‘That’s you, that is.’ It’s
not much really is it. Yet it is an outstanding piece of biological
complexity.

Within
your brain you have some 86 billion neurons, those are
the nerves that do the thinking. Something like a quarter of the
energy you generate from the food you eat goes into running the
brain. Yet the numbers become more astounding as we go. On average
each neuron connects with seven thousand other neurons. That
means you have something like one to five hundred trillion
connectionsin
your brain. It’s
no wonder that we haven’t yet been able to duplicate it with
silicon chips or quantum computing. You are an amazing thing,
140-200 pounds of self-aware animal. It is an astoundingly wonderful
thing to be human, to feel alive,
simply to be.

But
if we’re not careful we can lapse into solipsism, that sense of
self-importance that semi-defines western culture. Sometimes we need
to gaze out of the train window at the houses going past, or at the
drivers and passengers alongside us or coming towards us on the
motorway, or at the airliner flying over our heads and remember that
every single one of them is an ‘I’. They
all ‘exist’ same as you. They all have their loves and fears.
They all have their hopes and ambitions. Every one of them is a part
of the same lineage that we all share, trailing back to some distant
African ‘Eve’, and we are all different yet all the same in our
experiences of ‘I am I’. And there are not thousands; we could
get our head around that. We’re
not even millions; we are billions, billions of individuals all
around at the same time, all being aware of who we are. The numbers
begin to mount up beyond our capacity to imagine, and then we need to
think that every thought you have, every thought they
have, every hope and dream is known and cared about by the
one we call God and who calls himself ‘I am’ who is being itself.

I
don’t even know all my own thoughts, let alone any of yours, and
yet in his later life the one whose birth we celebrate tonight says
that not even a sparrow can fall to the ground without God knowing
about it. In order to get our heads around this and feel the
appropriate awe we need to come back to that mental image of our
brains held between our hands. That’s
it; that’s all that you are. The reason you can’t get your heads
around God knowing all that God knows is because we
can’t do that. We are so very limited. Even with all of those
connections in our brains, we are so little, so tiny, and we have
such hyper-inflated ideas of ourselves that we can scarcely begin to
comprehend the magnitude of this God who we worship.

We
cannot imagine a God knowing as much as that because we can’t do
it, and because we can’t do it, we assume that he can’t, and
thus, atheism, it seems to me, is born from a rational arrogance. Yet
when you look down at an ant crawling around on the floor, do you
wonder if it’s interested in Eastenders? Do you ponder its ability
to comprehend quantum physics? Of course not. We accept the
difference between the ant and the human to be so vast that
understanding is not possible. Yet we rarely scale up from ourselves
to think big, to think really
big. Maybe
awe frightens us. Yet
humility and awe are such a part of Christmas that, unless we start
thinking about the size of God in comparison to our minuscule nature,
and recognise it for what it is, we are not going to be able to
recognise what has taken place here in our tiny world.

You
see an awareness of the number of humans is only the start of it.
Once we start upscaling we can start thinking of the number of stars
in our galaxy, which is between two and four hundred billion, many of
whom we know to have planetary systems. And
scaling up from there we begin to think in terms of two hundred
billion galaxies in the visible universe, each containing, on
average, a similar number of stars to our own. We can’t get our
heads around the number of individual human stories in our county,
let alone the nation or the world, and yet there is a mindblowingly
large universe out there with billions upon billions of planets, many
of which may also support self aware life.

And
we, in this tiny corner, have the audacity to say that one being
created all that; that one being is fully aware of all of that. It’s
no wonder that people think Christians are nuts, irrational,
contemptible and stupid. Yet I want to suggest that to adopt such a
position is an arrogant one, one which forgets that, try as we might,
we are actually very little, vanishingly small creatures.

How
could we possibly comprehend how one vast Being manages to create,
sustain and be aware of it? Of course we can’t, and that’s the
whole point of awe. It is an emotional gift which says, ‘I cannot
get my head around this purely because it is not possible for a human
to really take this all in. Yet it might still be possible.’

And
at Christmas that has to be our starting place because only then can
we begin to imagine what it must take, what it must have meant, how
incredibly, unbelievably important it must have been for the mighty
creator to allow the part of God's self that is named the Son, or the
Word to be emptied of all that power and ultra-awareness and to be
born a human birth with a tiny little brain, initially too small to
be able to knit together a coherent divine thought.

That’s
the true miracle of what we’re celebrating tonight. It doesn’t
matter whether you start with a question of how he did it, whether
Mary was a virgin, whether all the Gospels tell it how it actually
happened. What is truly important is that it did happen. And only
once we can comprehend the magnitude of what God accomplished in that
emptying out of himself can we ask the question, ‘Why?’

The
only force capable of making that kind of emptying out possible is
the love of a Creator whose experience of reality transcends anything
we can begin to imagine, who was willing to do that in order that we
can be in relationship, that we can speak the same language and
realise that we are wanted, each and every individual one of us, we
are desired by God more for who we are as people than we can take in.

So
did it happen? I believe so.

And humility and awe are the only two
emotions than can make sense of it for us.